The Five Year Lie

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, graphic violence, and death by suicide.

In William Shakespeare’s tragic play Hamlet (1609), the villain is Claudius, a man who kills his brother to inherit the throne and then marries his brother’s widow. In the novel, as a joke, Uncle Ray alludes twice to the fact that in marrying Ariel’s mother and taking over the family company after his brother Edward’s ostensible death by suicide, he is reenacting the play.

However, Ray’s offhandedness is misdirection: Ray really is mirroring many of Claudius’s actions. Claudius’s opening speech attempts to get Hamlet on his side by implying that Hamlet should think of him as a father. Similarly, Ray’s kindness and public-facing altruism lull Ariel and her mother into a false sense of security that Ray has their best interests at heart. Just as Claudius quickly seduces Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, so too does Ray have an affair with Ariel’s mother. Unlike the rest of the novel’s characters, Ariel’s mother is never named—identified only by her relationships to Ariel, Ray, and Edward, she is diminished to the status of an object. Finally, the ghost of Hamlet’s father declares that Claudius poisoned him. Ray also kills Edward through a kind of poisoning—switching out Edward’s medication for a lethal drug overdose.

While Ray resembles Claudius, Ariel has less in common with Hamlet himself. Although both are activated by a messenger from the dead—in the play, the ghost of Hamlet’s dead father, and in the novel, a text message from the ostensibly dead Jay—Hamlet is a famously indecisive character, whose attempts to uncover Claudius’s conspiracy are half-hearted, but Ariel takes an active role in uncovering the truth around her.